Archive for All

John Lennon was my first real hero. He was imperfect and messy and at times ridiculous and he understood that and embraced it. He was also brilliant and beautiful and genuine.

I was sitting in my room in Monsey, NY listening to what I believe was a Jets game on the radio when the announcer cut in and said John Lennon had been shot and wounded and rushed to the hospital. I turned my dial to WNEW and spent the next several hours listening to Beatles and Lennon’s music on the radio as the reports got grimmer and finally the worst news of all. I for some reason had the presence of mind to stick a cassette tape and record the news reports and music.?

I think I still have that tape. I brought it to school the next day and one of our teachers, I can’t recall who, had set the day aside to talk about what happened. I think it’s the first time I cried openly in front classmates and friends. I couldn’t stop. I brought the tape with me and had it in class. Someone asked me why the hell would I think to tape such a thing and I replied “Because this is important.” I didn’t really understand how so, but I knew it was. I was also called a faggot for crying. Something that I was already used to for other reasons.

Part of my soul shattered that day and it is a sadness that I have held and will die with. The world went from what was already a scary and unpredictable (Energy Crisis, Iranian Hostages, etc) to being terrifyingly so for me, 15 years old and madly in love with John and the Double Fantasy album. I remember biking down to the record store and buying it as soon as it came out. I still remember the feel of the cellophane as it peeled off the album cover John and Yoko kissing. I wanted my life to be that life– incredibly interesting and prolific and artistic and crazy and doing good things and what I wanted and all the time in love.

That evening Scottso (Scott Muni) played a recording of when John had stopped by the WNEW offices a few years earlier (I believe) and spun some of his favorite music– mostly obscure R &B and Be Bop tunes. It dawned on me that were was so much I didn’t know about Lennon or anyone for that matter. A complexity of life started to reveal itself to me.

I can still touch the exact feelings of horror and incredible sadness when the doctor at St Luke’s Roosevelt pronounced his death. My heart caves in upon itself, I feel the world spinning uncontrollably about me and I find it hard to breathe and see through tears.

The world broke that day. What I’ve learned since is that it never really worked right in the first place.

Share this:

Art Gish died today
This beautiful man
of peace and thoughtfulness
of unending patience and bravery.
He practiced his beliefs boldly
and intensely
without ever shouting or belittling.
Coaching young stoners on non-violent protest
Defying Israeli tanks, a canon barrel at his face
he taught to find the good, the humanity in every situation
And that there can be no peace without a conversation.

Art Gish died today
This beautiful man
A man of Love and Peace
When his tractor rolled on him
and caught fire, pinned in the blaze

Share this:

Integrating Twitter with a screening of “Taxi Driver” What is the point?

This is absolute heresy coming from a social media evangelist, but I still think Twitter is an incredibly lame one-trick pony whose trick is pretty dull. At worst Twitter becomes intrusive and depowering or at best creates a Limited Amnesiac Collective Consciousness.

Let me explain.

I just read on mashable.com that Sony is doing a screening of Taxi Driver tonight and will be integration twits—err- tweets during the event. How could the experience of (arguably) Martin Scorcese’s finest film possibly be enhanced or add value by having a bunch of tweets flying about while watching it? Even if we aren’t talking about a masterpiece like Taxi Driver- let’s replace it with I don’t know, a Pauly Shore Movie “Encino Man”, how does the nattering of everyone you don’t know tossing comments and flames at you enhance the experience rather than wholly detract from it?

Now you might argue that anything that distracts you from “Encino Man” is good thing, but you’re just being snarky.

Twitter has value as trending crowdsourced topics, such as Michael Jackson’s health or even political events- it has value in that I get to learn what is bugging my daughters, what’s bugging Diablo Cody, what’s amusing Adam Savage and a few others I can’t mention on a particular day. It has some value on being able to ping several people or tossing and idea out there to get VERY brief feedback.

But for the most part it distracts from and dilutes whatever anyone is trying to talk about, especially in the moment. Tweeting during a move is akin to having the entire movie theatre nattering at you while you’re trying to enjoy a movie. Even worse (and please my friends and colleagues, please know I love you regardless); when people tweet during a conference while someone is speaking does two things primarily: it’s is taking the tweeters attention away from the speaker and it is drawing the attention away from someone else listening to check their tweets about what other people are saying about what they are currently experiencing. It’s akin to sharing an experience with other vicariously through a tool that helps you experience the event less. And for those of us not currently experiencing the event, we have absolutely no context to what is being tweeted not could we if the tweeter wanted to because—well; 140.

Shared experiences is how society grows and learns and becomes better- through good and bad events. Shared experiences can be fun and enlightening. If 1 million people decide to watch and share the Taxi Driver experience tonight and they all decide to tweet during the event- I can pretty much guarantee that anything intelligent, poignant or epiphianic will be lost in the sea of tweets and/or if you are going to constantly refresh your screen or phone for updated trending topics, you aren’t watching the movie so you’re really not sharing the experience.

And tomorrow, none of it matters, because there is no permanence; no way to review, store and refer back to anything more than a few hours or days old without tremendous effort. And if you have that kind of time, you are either very wealthy with absolutely no life or you are spending an inordinate amount of time chasing a fleeting 140 character or less thought when you probably should be doing something else- like having a beer, finishing that report or actually speaking to the person next to you.

Twitter is fun. It has some limited value. It can create awareness and solve problems. It can allow you to stalk your favorite person(s) or find out about a sale on video cards or where to “tweet up” to get collectively trashed.

But please stop cramming it into every possible use-case no matter how stupid it might be for the sake of being “Twittified”.

Share this:

Mahmoud Darwish passed away at age 67 following open heart surgery according to cnn.com. I don’t know Arabic, but listening to his voice there are universal understandings. Pain- frustration, hope, despair, anger, and again hope.

It’s so rare that a voice of reason, passion and eloquence is heard above the din of hyperbole, stupidity and punditry; it is sad when that voice becomes quiet.

Poets illuminate the mundane and underscore the awful- life is… hard. And beautiful.

There are too few of us and tonight there is one less. When we are gone, we are gone and nothing we do comes with us- it’s what we pass on that matters.

I wish and hope Mr. Darwish now finds the peace that was denied him during his lifetime.

1: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other’s false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony
2 : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning
3 : Being too busy working deeply in launching, building and supporting social communities and environments to actually ever read, comment on or post blogs myself and feeling wholly disconnected.